Quite a few people have asked me how Elyssa's sleep training is coming along. Well, the progress has been disappointing.
I wanted to write a day-by-day account like my previous post, but I delayed this post so much that I've forgotten the details. So I'll just write on the overall progress.
We had 2 objectives which were:
(a) to train her to sleep on her own at night (without requiring to suckle to sleep)
(b) to train her not to wake up for night feeds.
For Obj (a), she still goes through the crying process before she finally sleeps, despite all the consistent routine of patting/singing/ switch-off lights/ soft baby music. Sometimes it's just a couple of minutes but on bad days it can be up to 15-20 minutes. No specific pattern there.
Much worse outcome for Obj (b). Most of the time she's been waking up crying anytime from 2am to 5am. It takes quite some time to soothe her back to sleep and sometimes the moment she's placed back on the bed she starts crying again. Sometimes it's after we get back to bed and juuust got to slumber land. Aaarghhh!!! And she gets very cranky when she wakes up for the second time. It takes awfully long to get her to sleep again. A few nights ago, a very exhausted hubby and I decided to just let her cry-it-out. My goodness.... she just screamed and yelled at the top of her lungs and kicked around for an hour. A very angry baby indeed! Same thing for the second night. A real drama queen. Adoi, she's got a stubborn character.
*Sigh*, why can't she be more like her mummy? According to my mum, I slept through the night when I was about 3 months old. And that I used to sleep a lot. Apparently, I once slept throughout when I was given a bath!
Will be continuing with this sleep training. Hopefully there will be good progress soon.
2 comments:
hang in there... my william wakes up a lot during the night too, but fortunately (if i can say that) that he suckles and just go back.. around 5am-ish, i will put him on my bed to nurse. then i drop off to sleep. din't wanna do that the whole night coz then it will be tough to train him to sleep alone in his cot next time.
i think the Cry It Out technique is not for every baby. I couldn't do it for both my boys. If they wake up, i just let them suckle back to sleep.
Less stress for them and for me.
Eventually they will be able to learn to go to sleep by themselves, when they are older. They won't need us forever.
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